For some fifteen years, dairy cattle farming has been considerably developing in various parts of the Andes. Milk is transformed into cheese or sold fresh, giving rural families a regular income which secures their food supply. The stock-rearing practices in these Andean dairying systems are unrecognized and are often considered, wrongly, as underperforming and inadequate.

The role of institutions providing rules, norms and regulations, in addressing challenges in communal resources management has been debated for several decades. This article analyses the role of informal institutions for addressing shortage of grazing land, conflicts among users of communal grazing land and resistance among users to shift from free grazing to zero grazing in Tigray, Ethiopia. We used in depth interviews and focus group discussions for data collection.

The vegetation dynamics of semi-arid and arid landscapes are temporally and spatially heterogeneous and subject to various disturbance regimes that act on decadal scales. Traditional field-based monitoring methods have failed to sample adequately in time and space in order to capture this heterogeneity and thus lack the spatial extent and the long-term continuous time series of data necessary to detect anomalous dynamics in landscape behavior.

Grazing intensity and bush encroachment are disturbance factors that may alter the floristic composition of herbaceous species. This paper investigates impacts of grazing (intensity) and bush encroachment on herbaceous species and rangeland conditions in Borana, southern Ethiopia. Herbaceous species richness and the abundance of each species were greater in the light‐ and moderate‐grazed areas than heavy‐grazed sampling plots. Similarly, herbaceous species richness was highest at an intermediate level of biomass and seems to decline as biomass increases.

Mediterranean areas of both southern Europe and North Africa are subject to dramatic changes that will affect the sustainability, quantity, quality, and management of water resources. Most climate models forecast an increase in temperature and a decrease in precipitation at the end of the 21st century. This will enhance stress on natural forests and shrubs, and will result in more water consumption, evapotranspiration, and probably interception, which will affect the surface water balance and the partitioning of precipitation between evapotranspiration, runoff, and groundwater flow.

Land-use and land-cover change are important drivers of global environmental change, affecting the state of biodiversity, the global carbon cycle, and other aspects of the earth system. In this article we describe the development of the land-use model LandSHIFT, which aims to simulate land-use and land-cover change on the continental and global scale. The model is based on a “land-use systems” approach, which describes the interplay between anthropogenic and environmental system components as drivers of land-use change.

This study used linear programming (LP) to analyse land-use alternatives in the traditional Umbundu farming system in the Angolan central highlands. Farmers of the region have traditionally produced maize and pulses for subsistence and vegetables and timber as cash crops. Different pasture and forest fallow rotations are used along catena production sites. The system is labour-intensive and uses animal traction. LP problems were formulated and solved for a baseline land-use alternative, improved diet alternative and maximal timber production alternative.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Burning of savanna is a globally important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In Australia, burning of savanna contributes between 2% and 4% annually of the nation’s reportable emissions. Complete removal of this source of emissions is unrealistic because fire is a ubiquitous natural process and important land-management tool. In the rangelands of northern Australia, fire is used to manage habitat for conservation, control woodland thickening, manipulate pastures for grazing and is an essential component of indigenous cultural and land-management practice.

Agistment is the practice of temporarily moving stock between properties, and is used by pastoralists both to strategically develop their enterprises and as a response to environmental heterogeneities such as variation in rainfall. This paper considers the agistment market in the northern Australian rangelands using the 'market failure framework'. This form of economic analysis identifies failings in a market, thus, provides a rigorous basis for designing interventions intended to improve market performance.

Large tracts of European rural land, mostly in the less favored areas (LFA), are devoted to low-inputs and large scale grazing systems (LSGS) with potential environmental and social functions. Although these LSGS may provide harbor for a good part of European nature values, their continuity is facing contrasting threats of intensification and abandonment. These areas, however, may be characterized by particular grazing structures and social dynamics of change that should be unveiled prior to attempts to devise rural development strategies or to adapt policy frameworks in general.